Friday 4 January 2019

a list, survey, discussion board, or document library with the specified title already exists in this web site

This was shown when I was about to activate "SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure" in "Site Collection Features". I was pretty sure this happened because I was trying to import a list from another site to this and it failed mid way. Some of the items from those sites had already imported (also from publishing site) and it failed my attempt to activate publishing feature. How do we fix this? Simple by deleting that list/library. There is a catch however, that list wont show up in the "Site Content" menu.
We can use "SharePoint Designer 2013" to remove that list/library. This is what I did to remove that list/library:
  1. Open up SharePoint Designer 2013
  2. Click on All Files
  3. Look for files/folder in the list which correspond to that name (example from picture Suggested Content Browser Locations)
  4. If you couldn't find the name maybe it didn't have space in the name or it might have different name.
  5. In my example picture above the name was not found in the list. So I searched the internet and figuring it out what it is. The name was PublishedLinks and it was a folder.
  6. After you figure it out, delete it and try reactivated it again.

Update: I faced another error and this time there was no information about the name of the list that already exist. Since this was a new site, I solved this by delete the web application and recreate it again (also delete the content DB). This was the screen when that error showed.